The subject application relates to image enhancement in a scanning or printing system. While the systems and methods described herein relate to image enhancement of portable document format (PDF) documents, it will be appreciated that the described techniques may find application in other printing systems, other image processing applications, and/or other scanning systems.
The use of automatic image enhancement (AIE) techniques in customer environments has exposed PDF workflow related problems that, at a generalized level, have a deleterious impact on the capabilities of print environment management software packages. These problems are common in end-user created PDF documents.
End-user created PDFs may be correct in the sense of describing the desired printed image with the PDF specification, but simultaneously incorrect in the sense of not codifying appropriate relationships between objects, thereby precluding comprehension of these relationships by systems processing the PDFs. As a result, sophisticated processing modules inside print environment management software packages, such as AIE, have incomplete PDF encoding to steer processing and are not aware of these relationships, which in turn leads to incorrect assumptions and decisions. This can result in gross image defects and artifacts.
The distinction between “PDF construct” and “human recognition” is gaining more and more relevance for printer/scanner manufacturers. Accordingly, more and more processing is required on the PDF components in order to maximize quality. Even more importantly, the processing has to be done in a fully automated, lights-out, manner.
Attempts to improve AIE for PDF documents have dealt exclusively with bitmaps (i.e., images, but not graphics). In a document containing both images and graphics, the graphical objects may touch each other. They may also touch image bitmaps. Conventional systems do not determine if the touching objects, including graphical objects, should be processed together or separately. Rather the bitmaps are stitched together based mainly on configuration conditions. Specifically, each bitmap needs to be rectangular, and so does the resulting stitched bitmap. Such systems are not capable of addressing non-rectangular objects (including non-rectangle images). Moreover, color consistency (e.g., whether the touching objects have similar color along the boundary) is not assessed. As a result, these systems stitch all objects into one large bitmap, which is undesirable. Moreover, these techniques stitch together objects that happen to have the same width and are neighboring each other.
Accordingly, there is an unmet need for systems and/or methods that facilitate mitigating problems associated with end-user generated PDFs with regard to AIE and object optimized rendering techniques while overcoming the aforementioned deficiencies.